I’m a mess. I don’t mean it lightly, I am a full grown woman, who has a job, my own apartment, a cat and I am a downright mess. But so are half the women in their mid-twenties. We went to school, we thought we knew what we wanted to do with our life, we worked hard, but now we are in the field that we trained to be in and we aren’t too sure if it is the right fit. When we were teenagers we thought we were going to be married and getting ready to have children in the next three years by now, but that’s not the case. We are a mess. We are balancing work, a social life, a social media presence, and a reservoir of new dreams that we didn’t know we had, because society rushed us into choosing a field of study, before we even knew who we were yet. And let’s not get started about taking days off from work, that is non-existent at our age. Our bosses are a separate generation, a generation that didn’t choose their career based on the cultivation of their passions, but based on what they were good at, those bosses are about the age of our parents, so we were raised to do the same. What am I good at? I am good at math and sciences. What should I do in life? Be an engineer. In that series of questions there was no mention as to what my passions were, what my dreams were, just a hypothetical, but true series of questions and answers. Being raised in a work hard environment, days off seemed shunned upon. As we sit in the lunch room and hear colleagues complaining about someone who took the day off, but probably didn’t need it. That someone went on mental health leave, but was just faking it. These conversations continuously surround us, so we then fear being the next person that they complain about, so we don’t take a day off from work, we don’t use our sick days. Then there is the addition of the age gap, we are twenty-something year old identifying women, we continue to fall into the stereotype as flakey and unreliable; but in reality, twenty-something year old women work their asses of every day, but still have the reputation.
Where does that leave us in the mess of things? We continue to lie to ourselves. The first lie we say is that it will get better. Will it? Will it get better if we don’t do anything about it. No. The second lie we say is that we are being treated differently because we are new. It’s a possibility, but after year two and year three working for the same company and the attitude doesn’t change, what is it really about? And the third lie we tell ourselves is that our dreams will come. They can. It’s a possibility that they will; however, it is not a possibility if you don’t do anything about it. If you continue to be miserable, or tolerate having the life that you do and don’t take steps forward to change it, you’re making the situation worse, not better.
Did you feel rushed into making your decisions? I sure did. I had to choose a career path that I wanted to follow and was left feeling like once it was chosen I couldn’t change my mind. Still being young enough to go back to school after realizing it might not be the right fit, that is frowned upon. I should have been able to figure out what I wanted. I shouldn’t be so flakey. I should just push through and eventually it will become mundane. This is not what we should be telling ourselves. Day in and day out these thoughts surround us and we become a giant mess. We put our face in on our knees in hopes that everything will sort itself out eventually.
We need to change it.
Yes, we are in a mess. No, we might be the complete reason we are there. Yes, only we can get out of it. There are going to be people surrounding you every day, judging your every move, watching you, possibly complaining about you to no end, but you need to keep being you. You need to start loving yourself, loving your passions and leaping towards them. We can continue the path that we are on, and we will be okay, we will be happy enough; but ‘happy enough’ is not good enough. We are a seed and if we don’t take care of ourselves, we won’t grow and change. We are supposed to grow. We are supposed to change. Make it happen. 😊